[Aaus-community-list] [aaus-list] Motyl Blog on Ukraine and Europe

[ajmotyl at andromeda.rutgers.edu]

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/new/blogs/motyl/Integrating_an_Authoritarian_Ukraine_into_Democratic_Europe



Cervena Barva Press Announces:

Alexander Motyl's

The Jew Who Was Ukrainian
      or
How One Man's Rip-Roaring Romp through an Existential Wasteland
Ended in a Bungled Attempt to Bump off the Exceptionally Great
Leader of Mother Russia

Order online at http://www.thelostbookshelf.com/cervenabooks.html

The Jew Who Was Ukrainian is a blackly comedic, anti-historical, and
absurdist novel about a tortured Jewish-Ukrainian man who struggles vainly
to find meaning at the intersection of Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s
Gulag.

Alexander Motyl is the author of four novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed
Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, and The Jew Who Was Ukrainian. He teaches at
Rutgers University-Newark and lives in New York.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

            The Jew Who Was Ukrainian is a devilishly witty intellectual
farce in which historical meditation faces off with madcap
lampoons of past and present political rogues and assassins.
Motyl's wildly imaginative riff on a century of East European
history is a must read. The Moral of the Popcorn reigns!
            -Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
            Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian Literature, Barnard College

            Only Alexander Motyl could conjure up this delightful mixture
of ghoulish, existential madcappery with insightful, satirical
brilliance. This is a fantasy for the adventuresome,
geopolitical reader who's eager to have his mind bent and
tickled.
            -Jed Feuer
            Composer, New York City

            This hilarious and poignant anti-historical novel is a
vertiginous journey through the Russian Revolution, Stalin's
purges, Nazi concentration camps, underground anarchist
gatherings, and the KGB network. A great master of
tragicomedy, Alexander Motyl shows with eminent irony that
twentieth-century history was funnier than Joyce imagined and
much more horrible than Orwell prefigured. His main character,
the laughable Volodymyr Frauenzimmer, works through his
excruciating guilt, split hence irreconcilable identity, and
obfuscating desire to settle accounts with history. Pondering
the question of whether to kill or not to kill the next
Russian dictator, Volodymyr transcends the border of the real
and enters a realm where infamous political terrorists and
their famous victims come together to discuss the
self-destructive power of hatred. This book is a cold shower
for anybody who still thinks you can change history and
passionate encouragement for all those confident that you can
do nothing about it.
            -Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
            Associate Professor in Jewish History, Northwestern University

            Candide meets The Terminator-in the funhouse of history,
ethnic prejudice, ethics. and the dysfunctional family. An
intellectual thriller (camps and assassins included).
            -George G. Grabowicz
            Professor of Ukrainian Literature, Harvard University

            Alexander Motyl is a master of seduction by the preposterous.
            -Myrna Kostash
            Writer, Edmonton, Canada




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